by Naomi Novik
But of course my father and brothers hadn’t been allowed to come; nor had anyone from my village, who would have grieved to see me burn. And the men who had come, they’d looked at me standing beside the Dragon, and I didn’t know how to name what was in their faces. I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter’s girl from Dvernik. It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first. They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn’t belong in their lives at all. I flinched from those looks. I was glad to go back into the tower.
That was the day I had taken Jaga’s book down to the library, and demanded that the Dragon stop pretending I had any more gift for healing than I did for any other sort of spell, and let me learn the kind of magic that I could do. I hadn’t tried to write a letter, even though I suppose the Dragon would have let me send one. What would I say? I had gone home, and I had even saved it, but it wasn’t my place anymore; I couldn’t go and dance in the village square among my friends, any more than six months ago I could have marched into the Dragon’s library and sat down at his table.
When I saw Wensa’s face, though, even from the library window, I didn’t think of any of that. I left my working hanging in the air, unfinished, as he’d so often ordered me never to do, and flung myself down the stairs. He shouted after me, but his voice couldn’t reach me: because Wensa wouldn’t be here if Kasia could have come. I jumped down the last few steps into the great hall, and at the doors I halted only a moment: “Irronar, irronar,” I cried: it was only a charm for untying snarled knots of thread, and slurred besides, but I flung profligate magic behind it, as though I’d determined to hack my way through a thicket with an axe instead of taking the time to find a way around. The doors jumped as if startled and opened for me.
I fell through them onto suddenly weak knees—as the Dragon delighted in telling me, caustically, there was good reason that the more powerful spells were also the more complicated—but I staggered up and caught Wensa’s hands as she raised them to knock. Her face, seen close, was wrung with weeping; her hair was hanging down her back, clouds of it pulling out of the long thick plait, and her clothing was torn and stained with dirt: she was wearing her nightshift and a smock flung over it. “Nieshka,” she said, gripping my hands too hard, strangling the feeling out of them and her nails digging into my skin. “Nieshka, I had to come.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“They took her this morning, when she went for water,” Wensa said. “Three of them. Three walkers,” her voice breaking.
It was a bad spring when even one of the walkers came out of the Wood, and went plucking people out of the forests like fruit. I’d seen one once, a long way off through the trees: like an enormous twig-insect, at once almost impossible to see among the underbrush and jointed wrong and dreadful, so when it moved I had shuddered back from it, queasy. They had arms and legs like branches, with long twiggy stalk-fingers, and they would pick their way through the woods and find places near foot-paths and near water, near clearings, and wait in silence. If someone came in arm’s reach, there was no saving them, unless you had a great many men with axes and fire nearby. When I was twelve, they caught one half a mile past Zatochek, the tiny village that was the last in the valley, the last before the Wood. The walker had taken a child, a little boy, bringing a pail of water to his mother for the washing; she’d seen him snatched and screamed. There had been enough women nearby to raise the alarm, and slow it down.
They had halted it at last with fire, but it had still been a day’s work to hack it to pieces. The walker broke the child’s arm and legs where it gripped it, and never let go until they finally cut through the trunk of its body and severed the limbs. Even then it took three strong men to break the fingers off the boy’s body, and he had scars around his arms and legs patterned like the bark of an oak-tree.
Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope. We could never know for certain, until one of them came out and proved they weren’t dead, and then had to be hunted down.
“Not Kasia,” I said. “Not Kasia.”
Wensa had bent her head. She was weeping into my hands, which she still clenched on like iron. “Please, Nieshka. Please.” She spoke hoarsely, without hope. She would never have come to ask the Dragon for help, I knew; she would have known better. But she had come to me.
She couldn’t stop weeping. I brought her inside, into the small entry hall, and the Dragon impatiently stalked into the room and held her out a draught, though she shrank from him and hid her face until I gave it to her. She relaxed heavily almost as soon as she had drunk it, and her face smoothed: she let me help her upstairs to my own little room, and she lay down on the bed quietly, though with her eyes open.
The Dragon stood in the doorway watching us. I held up the locket from around Wensa’s neck. “She has a lock of Kasia’s hair.” I knew she’d cut it from Kasia’s head the night before the choosing, thinking she would have nothing left to remember her daughter by. “If I use loytalal—”
He shook his head. “What do you imagine you’re going to find, besides a smiling corpse? The girl is gone.” He jerked his chin at Wensa, whose eyes had drifted shut. “She’ll be calmer after she sleeps. Tell that driver to come back in the morning to take her home.”
He turned and left, and the worst of it was how matter-of-factly he’d spoken. He hadn’t snapped at me, or called me a fool; he hadn’t said the life of a village girl wasn’t worth the chance the Wood might take me to add to its host. He hadn’t told me I was an idiot drunk on success in throwing potions, in pulling flowers from the air, to suddenly think I could save someone the Wood had taken.
The girl is gone. He’d even sounded sorry, in his abrupt way.
I sat with Wensa, numb and cold, holding her hard red callused hand in my lap. It was growing dark outside. If Kasia was still alive, she was in the Wood, watching the sun go down, light dying through the leaves. How long did it take, to hollow someone out from the inside? I thought of Kasia in the grip of the walkers, the long fingers curled around her arms and legs, knowing all the while what was happening, what would happen to her.
I left Wensa sleeping and went downstairs to the library. The Dragon was there, looking through one of the vast ledgers he made records in. I stood in the doorway staring at his back. “I know you held her dear,” he said over his shoulder. “But there’s no kindness in offering false hope.”
I didn’t say anything. Jaga’s book of spells was lying open on the table, small and worn. I’d been studying only spells of earth this week: fulmkea, fulmedesh, fulmishta, solid and fixed, as far from the air and fire of illusion as magic could get. I took the book and slipped it into my pocket behind the Dragon’s back, and then I turned around and went silently down the stairs.
Borys was still outside, waiting, his face long and bleak: he looked up from his blanketed horses when I came out of the tower. “Will you drive me to the Wood?” I asked him.
He nodded, and I climbed into his sleigh and drew the blankets around me as he made the horses ready again. He climbed aboard and spoke to them, jingling his reins, and the sleigh leapt out over the snow.
The moon was high that night, full and
beautiful, blue light on the shining snow all around. I opened Jaga’s book as we flew, and found a spell for the quickening of feet. I sang it softly to the horses, their ears pricking back to listen to me, and the wind of our passage grew muffled and thick, pressing hard on my cheeks and blurring my sight. The Spindle, frozen over, was a pale silver road running alongside, and a shadow grew in the east ahead of us, grew and grew until the horses, uneasy, slowed and came to a halt without any word or any movement of reins. The world stopped moving. We were stopped under a small ragged cluster of pine-trees. The Wood stood ahead of us across an open stretch of unbroken snow.
Once a year, when the ground thawed, the Dragon took all the unmarried men older than fifteen out to the borders of the Wood. He burned a swath of ground along its edge bare and black, and the men followed his fire, sprinkling the ground with salt so nothing could grow or take root. In all our villages we saw the plumes of smoke rising. We saw them going up also on the other side of the Wood, far away in Rosya, and knew they were doing the same. But the fires always died when they reached the shadow beneath the dark trees.
I climbed down from the sleigh. Borys looked down at me, his face tense and afraid. But he said, “I’ll wait,” although I knew he couldn’t: Wait how long? For what? Wait here, in the Wood’s very shadow?
I thought of my own father, waiting for Marta, if our places had been changed. I shook my head. If I could bring Kasia out, I thought I could get her to the tower. I hoped the Dragon’s spell would let us in. “Go home,” I said, and then I asked him, wanting suddenly to know, “Is Marta well?”
He nodded slightly. “She’s married,” he said, and then he hesitated and said, “There’s a child coming.”
I remembered her at the choosing, five months ago: her red dress, her beautiful black braids, her narrow pale frightened face. It didn’t seem possible we’d ever stood next to each other, just the same: her and me and Kasia in a row. It took my breath, hard and painful, to imagine her sitting at her own hearth, already a young matron, getting ready for childbed.
“I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred: someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t. Even if I came somehow out of the Wood alive again, I’d never have what she had. And Kasia—Kasia might already be dead.
But I wouldn’t go into the Wood with ill-wishing. I took a deep hard breath and made myself say, “I wish her an easy birth and a healthy child.” I even managed to mean it: childbirth was frightening enough, even if it was a more familiar terror. “Thank you,” I added, and turned away to cross over the barren ground, to the wall of great dark trunks. I heard the jingle of the harness behind me as Borys turned the horses and trotted away, but the sound was muffled, and soon faded. I didn’t look around, taking step after step until I stopped just beneath the first boughs.
A little snow was falling, soft and quiet. Wensa’s locket was cold in my hand as I opened it. Jaga had half a dozen different finding spells, small and easy—it seemed she’d had a habit of misplacing things. “Loytalal,” I said softly, to the small coiled braid of Kasia’s hair: good for finding the whole, from a part, the scribbled note on the spell had said. My breath fogged into a small pale cloud and drifted away from me, leading the way into the trees. I stepped between two trunks, and followed it inside the Wood.
I expected it to be more dreadful than it was. But at first it seemed only an old, old forest. The trees were great pillars in a dark endless hall, well apart from one another, their twisting gnarled roots blanketed in dark green moss, small feathery ferns curled up close for the night. Tall pale mushrooms grew in hosts like toy soldiers marching. The snow hadn’t reached the ground beneath the trees, not even now in the deep of winter. A thin layer of frost clung to the leaves and fine branches. I heard an owl calling somewhere distantly as I picked my way carefully through the trees.
The moon was still above, clear white light coming through the bare branches. I followed my own faint breath and imagined myself a small mouse hiding from owls: a small mouse hunting for a piece of corn, a hidden nut. When I went gleaning in the forest, I often daydreamed as I walked: I lost myself in the cool shady green, in the songs of birds and frogs, in the running gurgle of a stream over rocks. I tried to lose myself the same way now, tried to be only another part of the forest, nothing worthy of attention.
But there was something watching. I felt it more and more with every step the deeper I went into the Wood, a weight laid heavily across my shoulders like an iron yoke. I had come inside half-expecting corpses hanging from every bough, wolves leaping at me from the shadows. Soon I was wishing for wolves. There was something worse here. The thing I had glimpsed looking out of Jerzy’s eyes was here, something alive, and I was trapped inside an airless room with it, pressed into a small corner. There was a song in this forest, too, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage. I crept on, my shoulders hunched, trying to be small.
Then I came stumbling to a small stream—barely a rivulet, frost thick on both banks and black water running between them, the moonlight coming through the break in the trees. And there was a walker on the other side, its strange narrow stick-head bent to the water to drink, its mouth like a crack open in its face. It lifted its head and looked straight at me, dripping. Its eyes were knots in wood, round dark pouched holes that some small animal might have lived in. There was a scrap of green woolen cloth dangling from one of its legs, caught on a jutting spar at the joint.
We stared at each other across the narrow running thread of the river. “Fulmedesh,” I said, my voice shaking, and a crack in the ground opened beneath the walker and swallowed up its back legs. It scrabbled at the bank with the rest of its long stick-limbs, thrashing silently, throwing up sprays of water, but the earth had closed up around the middle of its body, and it couldn’t pull itself out.
But I folded in on myself and swallowed a cry of pain. It felt like someone had hit me with a stick across my shoulders: the Wood had felt my working. I was sure of it. The Wood was looking for me now. It was looking, and soon it would find me. I had to force myself to move. I sprang over the stream and ran after my faint cloudy spell, which still drifted on ahead of me. The walker tried to catch at me with its long cracked-wood fingers as I skirted around it, but I ran past. I came through a ring of larger trunks and found myself in an open space around a smaller tree, the ground here heavy with snow.
There was a fallen tree stretching across the space, a giant, its trunk taller across than I was. Its fall had opened up this clearing, and in the middle of it, a new tree had sprung up to take its place. But not the same kind of tree. All the other trees I’d seen in the Wood had been familiar kinds, despite their stained bark and the twisted unnatural angles of their branches: oaks and black birch, and tall pines. But this was no kind of tree I had ever seen.
It was already larger around than the circle my arms could make, even though the giant tree couldn’t have fallen very long ago. It had smooth grey bark over a strangely knotted trunk, with long branches in even circles around it, starting high up the trunk like a larch. Its branches weren’t bare with winter, but carried a host of dried-up silvery leaves that rustled in the wind, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere else, as though there were people just out of sight speaking softly together.
The trail of my breath had dissolved into the air. Looking down at the deep snow, I could see the marks where the walkers’ legs had poked through and the lines their bellies had drawn, all going to the tree. I took a wary step through the snow towards it, and then another, and then I stopped. Kasia was bound to the tree. Her back was against the trunk and her arms drawn backwards around it.
I hadn’t seen her at first because the bark had already grown over her.
Her face was turned up a little, and b
eneath the skim of the covering bark I could see her mouth had been open, screaming while the bark closed over her. I made a choked cry, helplessly, and staggered forward and put out my hands to touch her. The bark was hard beneath my fingers already, the grey skin smooth and hard, as though she had been swallowed into the trunk whole, all of her made a part of the tree, of the Wood.
I couldn’t get a hold on the bark, though I tried frantically to claw and peel it away. But I managed at last to scrape off a little thin piece over her cheek, and beneath I found her own soft skin—still warm, still alive. But even as I touched it with my fingertip, the bark crept quickly over it, and I had to draw back my hand, not to be caught myself. I covered my mouth with my hands, even more desperate. I still knew so little: no spell came to my mind, nothing that could get Kasia out, nothing that would even put an axe in my hands, a knife, even if there had been time to carve her free.
The Wood knew I was here: even now its creatures were moving towards me, stealthy padding feet through the forest, walkers and wolves and worse things still. I suddenly was sure that there were things that never left the Wood at all, things so dreadful no one had ever seen them. And they were coming.
With bare feet in the dirt, fulmia, ten times with conviction, will shake the earth to its roots, if you have the strength, Jaga’s book had told me, and the Dragon had believed it enough not to let me try it anywhere near the tower. I had felt doubtful, anyway, about conviction: I hadn’t believed I had any business shaking the earth to its roots. But now I fell to the ground and dug away the snow and the fallen leaves and rot and moss until I came to the hard-frozen dirt. I pried up a large stone and began to smash at the earth, again and again, breaking up the dirt and breathing on it to make it softer, pounding in the snow that melted around my hands, pounding in the hot tears that dripped from my eyes as I worked. Kasia was above me with her head flung up, her mouth open in its soundless cry like a statue in a church.